World leaders must do more for Chibok schoolgirls – Ezekwesili

The co-founder of the Bring Back Our Girls campaign urged world leaders on Friday to do more to help hunt down Boko Haram militants and rescue hundreds of schoolgirls abducted in northeastern Nigeria more than a year ago.

Obiageli Ezekwesili, a former Nigerian education minister and World Bank vice president, said she believed the girls were safe, despite militants’ videos claiming to have converted them to Islam and married them off to their captors.

“I always see hope. Hope is inexhaustible. The day we stop hoping, we all die,” Ezekwesili told delegates at the Women in the World Summit in the Indian capital, adding that there was no real evidence to suggest the girls would not return home.

“But beyond staying hopeful, what needs to happen is that the leaders of the world need to find their strength. I really do not understand how leaders of the world sat around and watched a renegade group become monsters terrorising the world.”

The militant Islamist group, whose six-year insurgency has caused thousands of deaths in Africa’s most populous nation and biggest oil producer, seized 276 girls from secondary school dormitories in Chibok in April 2014.

Some girls managed to escape but 219 are still missing, despite Ezekwesili’s #bringbackourgirls social media campaign which brought the issue to global attention.

-Thenewsnigeria